Quick Start: Guide to Accounting

Podio can help you simplify and streamline your accounting tasks. This guide will walk you through a basic accounting setup. Please note that this guide is a template that is meant to be modified to fit your own team's processes, so some of the pieces may not be necessary for your own team or may need some adjustments before you get up and running.

We recommend getting started with the Accounting pack of apps from our App Market. Here you will find 6 different apps where you will store your accounting data.

The first app is the Clients app. As you may guess, this app is where you will store all of your client information. Each item in this app is an individual client, with all of their contact information, documents, and other details stored inside. You can add clients to this app manually, or you can use a webform to allow clients to submit their information to the app themselves.

Many of the other apps in this pack link in with the clients app via a relationship field, which gives you easy access to all of the relevant data for your clients in one central place.

The Returns app is used to store tax return information for your clients. As noted above, this field is linked to the Clients app, so you can keep your returns organized for each of your clients.

Use the Audits app to audit any returns in your Returns app. This app links to both the Clients and the Returns app, so you can easily access your audits from the client view or from an individual return.

The Financial Reviews app is an Event app where you can schedule meetings with your clients. Here you can set the meeting date and agenda, and attach any files you will need to reference during the meeting. You can also set this up as a repeating meeting if you will have regular meetings with each client.

The Bookkeeping app lets you schedule month-end reviews with each of your clients. We recommend using the workflow tool to automatically schedule tasks for each review, so that you and your team will have an easy overview of everything that needs to happen for the review to be completed.

Finally, the Timesheets app is for tracking the time that you and your team spends on their tasks. Your team members can add an item here anytime they need to log hours spent on their work. Use the reporting tool to track time for each team member in a given time period. You can also add a relationship field to your app to link your timesheets to your Clients, which would let you report on the time spent for each client.

We hope that this guide will help you and your team start working more effectively and efficiently in Podio. If you have any questions about how you can set up your own team's processes, don't hesitate to get in touch with our support team and we'll be happy to assist.